This blog post will help you load balance multiple Director Servers monitoring a delivery controller using NetScaler. Director 7.9 is used in this instance, but this is applicable to earlier versions of Director, too.

Note: This post is not going to tell you what the #1 most optimal configuration for load balancing is because there is no such thing. What works best totally depends on your environment and on what your needs are.

To relate things better, imagine an XenDesktop and XenApp enviornment with a delivery controller. Two Director servers to cater to help desk admins. And then we have a “traffic cop”, NetScaler. Let’s see how we can glue back this puzzle in easy steps.

Step 1: Configure Director

The first step is to configure the  two Director Servers to the delivery controller. Its best adviced to not install them on the same server that has the delivery controller. After you install them, configure  Director to point to a delivery controller by editing the web config file and restarting the IIS in both the Director servers.

C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Director

 Step 2: Creating a load balancing service group in NetScaler

Login to NetScaler (http://NetScaler Applicance IP/login/do_login). Navigate to Configuration – Traffic Management – Load Balancing – Servers.

Click on the ” Add” button and add the Director servers here. In the example below, we have used two of them and have named them Director1 and Director2.

After adding both the servers, we now need to create a load balancing service group. Navigate to Configuration – Traffic Management – Load Balancing – Service group in NetScaler.

Click on “Add” button and add  a new service group. Protocol used here is HTTP.

Step 3: Creating a service group member

Once the service group has been created, a confirmation page is displayed. At the bottom of the page, there is a “No Service Group Member” warning. So, let’s go ahead and create a service group member.

Click on the navigation arrow and we will be taken to the “Create Service Group Member” page. Select “Server Based” radio button and add both the servers you created earlier (Director1 and Director2).

The default port and weight have been maintained. Click on create.

You now get a confirmation that 2 service group members have been added to the service group we created earlier.

Click on Done.

Step 4: Creating a monitor binding

For creating the monitor binding, click on the +Monitors on the right side of the page.

Over here, we have selected  http monitor to bind.

We will now get a confirmation that the http monitor has been bonded to the service group we had created earlier.

Step 5: Creating a virtual server

Navigate back to ” Virtual Servers” under “Load Balancing”. Click on Add. Assign a static IP  to the virtual server. The protocol and port as HTTP and 80 in this example.

We now get a confirmation page.

At the bottom of the page you get notified that there is “No binding to the Service Group”. Click on the navigation arrow and in the service group binding page, select the service group we created earlier and bind it to the virtual server.

You now get a confirmation that the binding has been successful.

Step 6: Creating a persistence

Now create a persistence. From the drop down select “sourceip” as the persistence. Modify the “time out”. Click on Done.

Logging into you load balanced Director server

You are almost ready to go. Now give a name for you virtual server IP in the DNS and you can use it and append it with /Director.

With these steps your Director server is load balanced.

That’s all folks.